If you would like to improve business performance, chances are that you will have to make some small changes and develop your own skills and capabilities at the same time.
It is crucial that if you want to improve business performance, you pay attention to the bottlenecks in your business that hold you back from growing and improving your profits.
8 ways to improve business performance
Below you will find a few tips on how to get started to improve business performance with your financial, risk, and skills review.
Your marketing can improve business performance
In case your business is not generating enough leads to get you more customers and grow, you will have to look at your marketing strategy for last year and make some improvements.
Are you shooting in the dark or trying everything giving up before your message would stick? It is recommended that you focus on outcomes and not processes and create an effective sales funnel that will help you turn visitors into customers.
Financial planning and management
As a business owner, it is important that you ensure you are getting paid on time by your clients and all your contract terms are clear. Assessing the financial stability of your clients is a key part of protecting your business.
Using Creditsafe to access detailed business credit reports can help you evaluate a client’s creditworthiness and payment history before entering into agreements. If you are not sure how to track and trace your payments and send automatic reminders to clients, you should contact a small business finance professional who will give you some important tips on improving your cash flow.
Security
We know that we need a website and business premises, but often don’t consider how to protect them. It is crucial that you review your hosting package and your server security to protect your assets and your customers.
At the same time, the security aspects of your business premises might need to be looked at. From investing in a CCTV system at your business to creating an access control for employees and backing up your data to the cloud, there are several things you can do to improve your business security and thus also improve business performance.
Improve knowledge to improve business
If you have already set business goals for the new year, you will need to list the things you need to achieve to enable yourself and your team to improve business performance. Investing in training and development might be something you haven’t thought about yet, but it will get you a lot of return and help you get to where you want to be in your business faster.
Risk management
Managing your business risks is important if you would like to survive the hard times. You might think about regulatory risks and competition only, but do you know what you would do if you had to face an expensive court case over an injury your company caused to the member of the public or one of your employees was involved in an accident using one of your fleet vehicles?
If you haven’t got the answer to the question what is public liability insurance? yet, it might be time to start doing your research.
Map your strategy
If a company wants to achieve its goals, it must first know what goals these are. If the overarching strategy to improve business performance is clearly formulated, everyone can pull together and concentrate on the essentials. This strategic “map” shows your value creation logic and is one of the most important success factors in every implementation to improve business performance.
It ensures that the strategy is focused and integrated, and it enables easy communication with all employees and external stakeholders. It is important that this strategy paper contains the result goals, core activities or core processes for achieving the results and the prerequisites for them as well as the intangible performance drivers. Based on this, the second step is to define the so-called “Critical Task”.
Definition of the critical task
There are two simple goals to improve business performance: Increase sales and/or optimize costs. For example, to improve sales effectiveness, focus on field service skills and earnings, the development of sales channels and the efficiency of sales processes. Profitability, market needs analyses and connectivity promote customer and market development, as well as product and price optimization increase sales.
Structural cost improvements, such as working capital management, sales overhead and fixed cost optimization, are important to improve the cost structure in companies.
Operational excellence based on Lean Management, Six Sigma and TQM in conjunction with optimizing the supply chain will ensure a lower and sustainable cost basis. Increase sales and reduce costs – sounds easy, but it is far from it. Any strategy to improve business performance is more than just collecting performance indicators based on the strategic map. It is about aligning the key elements with the “Critical Task”, which reflects the strategy.
Analyze to improve business performance
Structures, processes, human capital and – very importantly – the climate and culture of a company must be coordinated and support the achievement of the “critical task”. For example, if your company’s culture is more characterized by spending money than saving, a pure cost optimization program will fail.
This means that the alignment of human capital, structural processes and culture in conjunction with a “critical task” is the key to every goal to improve business performance. As soon as the organization begins to collect performance data, it must be analyzed and worked out what it ultimately means.
This gives you insights into what your company may need to change in order to achieve goals set to improve business performance. Data is power – but only if it can be extracted quickly and efficiently. It offers the opportunity to transform performance data into relevant information and knowledge. This information then supports you in critical decision-making.
Leading companies, for example, use their information to measure results quickly and accurately and analyze deviations that undermine efforts to improve business performance. It is important that a positive learning culture is created in companies, in which performance findings are discussed and decision-makers come together to discuss deviations openly and honestly.
Conclusion
When looking to improve business and growing your sales, these are the most crucial underlying areas you should pay attention to that will help you reduce your risks and increase your capabilities.
